Is your virtual contact center equipped to personalize every customer call that comes in?
Can your team not only answer quickly, but to greet the customer by name, recall the past calls the customer has made, and reference the product or service the customer has purchased from your business?
If the answer is “no,” then you may need to reevaluate your remote visual support software, because according to Forbes, over 70% of customers expect personalized customer service.
But providing a great customer experience in your contact center goes beyond just personalization. Technical support and customer service are paramount to your business’s success. To deliver your customers with a service experience that will impress, you need a flexible, reliable solution that can solve customer issues in real-time.
When you implement a software solution, you know it will cost you something, but if you select the wrong remote customer service solution for your business, you may end up paying for it twice.
You’ll not only pay for the software itself, but you’ll also pay for the loss of customers who are dissatisfied with the service your software enables your team to provide.
What are some of the challenges for which you should prepare? Let’s take a moment to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and examine some of the frustrations they face when working with a virtual contact center to get assistance with a problem they are facing.
Let’s examine a scenario: A customer is struggling to fix a technical issue. He calls your virtual contact center for assistance, and the customer service agent tries her best to guide him through the process using the available virtual solutions.
The customer hangs up, believing he may just be able to implement that solution, only to immediately discover that he cannot translate what the representative described to him into a workable solution. So, what does he have to do? Pick his phone right back up and call your customer service line - and wait in the queue - again.
If a client has to call more than once about the same problem, two things are almost certainly happening: First, there is a roadblock in your support processes or software that you need to address, and second, your client is getting frustrated.
Repeat calls, often called “chronic calls,” are a drain on time for both the contact center employees and the client. It’s worth investing in a software solution to help you provide quality live remote assistance and get the client’s issue settled on the first call.
If a customer has to call twice for the same issue, their satisfaction with their service - and your brand - goes down.
When considering capacity and customer support, you must take agent performance metrics into account. You might think agent performance and customer satisfaction would be directly proportional, but unfortunately, that may not be the case.
Contact centers generally measure their agents' performance on the metric of average handle time (AHT). Because this metric prioritizes speed, the agent is more likely to send in a technician or simply process a return if they cannot resolve the customer’s issue quickly.
Either of these solutions will ultimately cost you an awful lot more than a few extra minutes of that agent’s time would have cost you. Investing in the right software solutions for your business can allow more issues to be solved quickly and efficiently by your front-line staff.
Embracing remote support allows you to solve customer service issues faster. Fewer can handle a much larger customer base in this model.
This sounds great, but it can be a double-edged sword. If your staff must field a high volume of support calls, but your business has not invested in the right virtual support tools, your agents will not efficiently resolve your customers’ issues. This can cause frustration in both your clients and your employees.
The matter of capacity boils down to quality vs. quantity. Do we want our agents to handle a large number of support requests, or do we want them to be able to solve callers’ problems effectively? With the right remote technical support software, you can have the best of both.
For your customer service team to progress meaningfully toward the group- and organization-wide goals, they will need to see where their performance fits into the bigger picture.
Many virtual contact center software solutions will allow individual agents to see their performance metrics but don’t allow easy access to data on how their performance influences the progress toward your business’s large-scale goals.
When your team doesn’t have processes to examine progress toward specific KPIs, the focus shifts away from important, long-term goals and onto maintaining the status quo of day-to-day operations. This can be detrimental to your growth.
Anyone who has called a big company’s customer service line has experienced the “customer service shuffle,” though they may call it by a different name. The customer service shuffle refers to the call transfer process.
Your customer calls to report an issue, and the first service representative cannot directly solve their problem and must refer them to another employee. The customer must then rehash the same struggles they just explained to the first representative. Rinse and repeat until their problem is finally solved, or they get so frustrated that they just hang up.
A software solution that logs staff’s steps with a given caller will help your customer service agents and your customer.
Another common customer complaint regarding virtual contact centers is long wait times. Is there anything worse than calling a service line because you need support, only to get stuck waiting for the next available agent for ten, twenty, thirty minutes?
Sometimes there will be unexpected spikes in volume, and long waits will be unavoidable. Still, if your customers are routinely stuck in painfully long queues when trying to reach your contact center, other issues are at play. Either you are chronically understaffed, or you have an efficiency problem somewhere in your processes.
When long wait times and the customer service shuffle come together, we get the additional frustration of long hold times. Long-hold times combine the irritating impatience of a long wait time with the frustration of being shuffled around and transferred.
Waiting on hold can be an aggravating experience for a customer who is already frustrated with whatever issue prompted them to call your virtual contact center in the first place.
If your virtual contact center software is inefficient or ineffective, your agents and technical staff will take longer to solve each customer’s problem, meaning everyone on hold is stuck waiting longer too. This is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
The problems listed so far have focused on how your support tools interact with your processes, but what happens when your support tools fail altogether?
Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than calling a support line and being thrust into a queue to wait is calling a support line and getting no answer. If your virtual contact center software isn’t working correctly, this is a challenge your customers may face.
Not reaching a service agent in their time of need will leave your customers feeling abandoned and irritated - neither of which will leave them with a fond impression of your business.
Poor quality virtual support software can also result in frustration through poor video call quality. Blurry video, lag, or audio that cuts in and out can make it difficult for your agents to assist your customers adequately.
Another issue your customers may face with inadequate service software is dropped calls. Imagine your software fails in the middle of walking your customer through a solution, and the call drops. Your customer will have to call back and wait for another agent to answer their call, and they will likely need to start the solution all over again.
Even if the technology you are using in your virtual contact center is reliable, it may present you with other challenges. Many virtual contact center software solutions currently on the market require the customer to download an app or install a program on their machine.
These solutions require you to ask your struggling, frustrated customer to take several additional steps before you can even begin assisting them with their issue. Consider exploring a software solution like Blitzz that does not require an app download for your customers.
Your customers have high expectations for customer service, whether that service is in-person or virtual. Suppose your virtual contact center software is not robust enough to help your agents skillfully manage calls in volume. In that case, it may very well be hurting your business and your relationship with your customers.
Instead of settling for a mediocre tool, you need to make sure you are working with a company capable of creating a customized solution for your team and your staff.
Blitzz offers multiple packages and a wide range of tools to help your business offer high-quality, dependable remote virtual assistance to your customers. Schedule a demo to see how Blitzz can work for you!